The F22 would probably be the one engaging F16s. Regardless if you are dogfighting in an F22 or F35 something else has gone wrong. The stealth planes sneak in and shoot enemy planes from far away.
This is irrelevant. The exercise was dogfighting, a phase which the F-16 would never be able to reach against an F-35 in combat without a multitude of things going wrong.
The F-35 can see and shoot down the F-16 with radar-guided missiles in BVR well before the latter is even aware the F-35 is in the area.
Dogfighting is minimally relevant to modern air combat for nuclear-armed nations. Things would have to be going extraordinarily badly in a war for the brass to start deciding to send their exceedingly expensive fifth-gen stealth fighters into dogfight coin tosses.
Hell, even an A-10 is a surprisingly effective dogfighter against modern fighters. The fighters have speed but the Warthog has an extremely tight turning radius and far better low-speed maneuverability, both of which allow it to stay inside the opponent’s “bubble” (the area inside which a turning jet can’t ever manage to point its nose). If the A-10 can keep it to a one-circle fight it will win handily. A fighter will often have to rely on a “boom and zoom” tactic (where it disengages, gains distance, and turns back around for a guns pass) but that can be quite low probability of kill and still be relatively risky if the A-10 has friendlies in the area feeling it location information.
But just like the situation already being discussed, this is for all practical purposes completely irrelevant. A flight of F-16s would engage and destroy a flight of A-10s from miles away with AMRAAMs and it would never have a chance to transition to an up-close dogfight.
If the enemy doesn’t know you’re there, you don’t have to fire from maximum range.
Either way, if the enemy turns and flees, from your perspective you’ve won the engagement. Whatever their purpose in the area was (SEAD, strike, air superiority, etc.) has been subverted.
I believe missiles have a certain range at which, when fired, the kill is ensured. The F35 would not need to fire the missile at the absolute possible range the missile can fly to, but at the range the kill is guaranteed.
Sort of. You can get to a range where kinematically defeating the missile is unlikely / impossible, but it still might fail due to any number of problems that can happen during the intercept.
It's not just a range, but the overall kinematic situation. It's referred to as the no escape zone, or more informally "the basket" from what I've read.
The article hits on my point about dogfighting. I don’t think most US modern planes except the F16 were designed for it. IIRC they weren’t even going to include guns on the F22.
> while the planes own the skies at modern long-range air combat
Any scenario in which American F22s would participate in combat action against European Eurofighters is far fetched, dogfighting or not.
In fact I would say if such an encounter were ever to happen, due to rule of engagements, a dogfight would be more likely than a BVR engagement (and likely to end without a single shot fired).
